Every bone in Peter Pettigrew’s body seemed to ache. Odd, he groaned to himself, I don’t remember it being the full moon already. He opened his eyes and slowly raised his throbbing head ever so slightly off the pillow. He was in the hospital wing. A very noisy hospital wing. Peter was surprised that the noise had not woken him sooner. How did he get here, anyway?
Peter turned his head to the right. Lily Evans was in the cot beside him, just barely regaining consciousness. She blearily took in her surroundings and then caught sight of Peter. He smiled weakly at her.
“What happened?” she croaked.
“I requested the wounded from the grounds, and you brought me yourself as a replacement, Miss Evans,” said Madam Pomfrey briskly, hustling over to their cots. “I hear the two of you had a rather nasty fall.”
“I guess we did,” said a bewildered Peter, not really remembering, but he assumed that was what had happened.
“Where do you think you’re going, Miss Evans?” said Madam Pomfrey sharply to Lily, who had thrown off her bedclothes and begun to rise from her bed.
“I need to find James,” she said steadily, even while swaying and gripping the bed frame for support.
“No, you don’t.” Madam Pomfrey pushed Lily firmly back down. “You and Mr. Pettigrew will stay put until I have examined you thoroughly.”
“Yes, Madam Pomfrey,” said Lily rather meekly, surprising Peter. He had thought for sure that Lily would have protested. He watched her closely as she settled back into bed.
“That’s a good girl,” said Madam Pomfrey approvingly. “I’ll be back with a potion for those injuries shortly.”
As soon as she was out of sight, Lily bolted from her bed, Peter scrambling belatedly behind her.
They opened the entrance doors overlooking the grounds. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, putting a hazy mist over their vision. Voldemort and his legion of Death Eaters were nowhere to be seen, but his perished followers were littering the wet ground, side by side with their enemies, the heroes of the Light. Lily and Peter wandered through the paths shaped by bodies and debris, searching for, yet dreading finding, a familiar face.
“Look, Lily,” whispered Peter, pointing to their right. He felt as if he was walking in a graveyard, and lowered his voice out of respect for those departed. Lily’s eyes followed his chubby finger downward.
“Oh, no,” she murmured. Professor Findlay, the Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor, was sprawled on the ground, her wand still clutched in her outstretched arm. Judging by the stricken expression frozen on her face, she did not appear to have died a painless death.
“The poor professor,” whispered Lily, closing her eyes and turning her face away, willing her brain to forget the image in front of her.
“There’s James!” exclaimed Peter, waving frantically. Lily squinted at the mass moving slowly toward them. Sirius and James were supporting a limping Remus between them.
“Who was it, Remus?” asked Lily as the two groups approached each other.
“Snape,” he grunted. James flashed Lily a sudden accusing glare, as if it was her fault that Snape had attacked Remus. She ignored him.
“Well, carry on to the hospital wing, then,” she said. “James,” she touched his arm. “Are you alright?”
“Please don’t start, Lily,” he said abruptly, not meeting her eyes. His words stung and surprised Lily, but she brushed them off.
“Okay, then, where’s Dumbledore?”
“Over there,” James inclined his head in the direction.
Lily nodded and kissed his cheek gently. “Ta, love,” she murmured, and then with forced cheerfulness, “Let’s get orders from Dumbledore, eh, Pete?”
They parted with the other Marauders and made their way to the Headmaster. Lily worried about James. Thus far, he was not handling his father’s death well, which was perfectly understandable at this point. Lily knew what James was suffering, but that did not mean that she would stand aside and allow James to give in and retreat inside of himself. He had been there to ground her when her parents had died, and no matter how much he tried to push away, Lily would not abandon him now.
***
After speaking with Professor Dumbledore, Peter and Lily scoured the vast lawn spreading out from Hogwarts Castle, looking for any survivors that may need medical attention. The Headmaster had also instructed them to identify anyone they possibly could, but only if the identity was absolutely certain.
Lily took a deep breath to steel herself as she knelt next to the nearest body, the face pressed into the grass. She reached with her left hand, keeping a firm grip on her wand with her right, and gently turned the person over so that he was lying face up. She recognized the mask immediately as that of a Death Eater and immediately withdrew her hand from the shoulder, as if the Death Eater was the Dark Lord himself. After a moment of calming herself, Lily removed the mask. Glazed, brown eyes bored into her green ones, slightly shocking Lily. Her eyes travelled over the Death Eater’s face, and Lily took in the sharp contours of the nose and cheekbones. She saw that he was a male, and that he had been bleeding profusely from a deep gash gouged along the left side of his jawbone and underneath his right ear. Lily toppled backward, horrified by the ugly laceration marring the Death Eater’s otherwise handsome face. She felt extremely light-headed, and took slow, deep breaths to prevent herself from fainting.
When she regained some semblance of composure, Lily again focused upon the body before her. She had to check for a pulse. As she brought her hand to the least bloodied side of the man’s neck, his eyes slowly followed her. She gasped in revulsion.
“He’s alive!” she breathed. How could that possibly be when he had most likely been lying there bleeding for hours? Nevertheless, this Death Eater was alive, but just barely.
Lily concentrated on quickly conjuring a hospital stretcher. She produced a bandage and, immobilizing the man, wrapped it gently around his neck. She then levitated the man onto the stretcher and sent both toward the castle and into the hospital wing.
She felt odd about saving the Death Eater, an obvious supporter of Lord Voldemort. Were he able to, he would have killed Lily before she could have helped him. Instead of returning his malice in like kind, she had just saved his life. After all, she reasoned firmly with herself, that man was a human being, too. A suffering human. And no one, not even a Death Eater, deserved to suffer like that. With her resolve somewhat tightened, Lily moved on to the next broken body.
***
Had Lily been granted her wish, she would have had no memory of the awful days to follow. However, no lamp was fortunate enough to cross paths with Lily Evans, so her memory remained.
Members of the Ministry of Magic had been called to Hogwarts to collect the corpses, dispel the press that had caught wind of the attack, and to take the wounded Death Eaters into custody. Voldemort’s attack had left dozens of students, professors, Aurors, civilians, and Death Eaters dead, and over one hundred wounded, all told, not counting escaped Death Eaters. Madam Pomfrey mended many, but others were whisked away by Floo and Portkey to St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. There were funerals and memorial services to attend, one emotional massacre after another, until the Hogwarts community felt utterly drained. By the end of it, all pain was dull and feeble as compared to the initial shock. Anger welled more prominently than any sense of loss.
The Hogwarts Express, delayed by a few days, had just pulled into the station at King’s Cross, and Lily and James were preparing to Apparate to the Potters’ home. Previously in the day, they had once again graced the lush castle grounds, this time under a beaming mid-June sun for the funeral of Professors Findlay, a married couple who had taught Defence Against the Dark Arts and Muggle Studies at Hogwarts. Lily and James had sent their belongings to the Potter residence beforehand and were now saying goodbye to the friends who had still remained at Hogwarts.
“Oh, I’ll miss you, Lily!” gushed Dorcas Meadowes, one of Alice’s best friends.
“You as well,” said Lily, capturing both Alice and Dorcas in a squished hug. “But I’ll see you both at the wedding in two weeks.”
Alice smiled brightly, blushing slightly; her smile faded marginally as she said, “Both of you try to be safe until then, understand? I don’t want anything to happen to my two best friends.”
“We’ll try,” Dorcas answered for them both. “And you heed your own advice, eh, Alice?”
“I will.” The girls parted.
Lily turned, searching the crowd for James, whom she spotted a short distance away with the other three Marauders. Lily joined them, silently slipping her hand into James’ hanging limply at his side. He pressed his palm to hers and graced her with a smile.
“So, I expect I’ll be seeing a lot of you boys over the summer, then?” said Lily. It wasn’t really a question.
“Oh, you can count on it, Lily,” said Sirius cheerfully. “It’ll be almost as if we’re all living together.”
Lily groaned good-naturedly. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle that much maturity,” she said wryly.
“You’ll be able to,” said Peter simply. “We’ve grown up, you see.”
Silence fell as they soaked in Peter’s abrupt yet truthful statement.
“Yeah, I guess you have,” Lily said softly, briefly catching James’ eye. She embraced the other three men one by one, echoing Alice’s earlier sentiments.
“Be safe, all of you,” she urged, releasing a slightly reddening Peter.
“You, too,” they chorused.
“See you soon.”
They went their separate ways, leaving Lily and James alone.
“Well,” said Lily to James after a short pause. “Shall we go, then?”
“Yeah.”
“James?” said Lily impulsively, halting James mid-turn.
“Yes?” he replied.
“I love you,” she said quietly, gazing up into his eyes with such intense tenderness that reminded James of all that he was still blessed with, even though he had lost someone valuable and irreplaceable.
He stared back into those pools of liquid emerald that were reflecting the brightness of the day. Merlin, he loved her. There were many things he would like to say to her, but his mind could not manage to form coherent sentences. She had saved him more than once in the last week, from both Lord Voldemort and the devices of his own mind. He would have lost himself to the recesses of despair if Lily had not been there to stop him and jostle his lethargic body back into the world of the living. There was a war tearing apart the world around them, but Lily was there to keep him grounded in reality.
His voice full of emotion, James replied, “I love you, also, Lily Evans,” and kissed her fervently on her rosy lips. Lily and James disengaged a moment later, each grinning giddily as they spun around together, perfectly in sync, for the journey home.
A/N: The title for this last chapter was taken from a quotation by a woman named Sonia Johnson, who said: “As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.” (www.thinkexist.com) I found that it described the aftermath of Voldemort’s first attack almost perfectly.